Saturday, January 29, 2011

Francesco Giusti is a freelance documentary photographer oriented toward investigating issues of social realities, communities and identity. His research about the long-standing inmates of a psychiatric hospital in Naples received the honorable mention of Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 1999 and was a finalist of Prix Care du Reportage Humanitair in 2000. In 2002, he was awarded the Canon Award for Young Photographers for Best Photographic Project with an intimate portrait story about a community of transvestites in Genoa, Italy.

During the last years, Giusti has documented immigration and asylum seekers issues especially in Italy and in the Mediterranean Sea. In 2006, he published the book Hotel Industria and the volume Ex Fabrica - Identities and mutations on the border of the metropolis, which received an honorable mention Ponchielli Award 2003. He has documented slums in Nairobi, Cairo and Port Au Prince. He has recently worked in Haiti, in the Sub-Sahara area of Western Africa and in Congo Brazzaville. His works has been published in Italy and abroad and exhibited in galleries and international photographic events.

Joanna Kustra born in south-eastern Poland in february, 1984. Her artistic skills developed quite early, since childhood she has been fascinated with music playing the piano and oboe. Her adventure with photography began at the age of 22 and in a short time from a hobby developed into a true passion and a way of living. She is a self-taught photographer, from the very beginning fascinated with people, portraits and fashion photography. Now lives and works both in Krakow and London.

Raised in a small mining village in the industrial North of England, Simon Procter studied Fine Art for many years and until recently was a sculptor and painter.

It was whilst doing a variety of odd jobs in Paris that he met by accident a member of the celebrated New York Visionaire team. He was asked to do the somewhat dangerous task of shooting a Dior show from 100 feet up in the roof. From this show he produced his first fashion image. This evolved rapidly to become two major stories in V Magazine, an exhibition at Colette (sponsored by both Armani and Prada) and finally to be picked up by Karl Lagerfeld for his publishing company 7L.

Simon continues to apply his unique painters aesthetic to the numerous features he has produced for V Magazine, Vogue Nippon, Harpers Bazaar and The New York Times.

Alejandra Laviada lives and works in Mexico City. Her works explores photography's shifting role and relationship to other artistic media, such us painting and sculpture. The images she creates emerge from the intersections between these different mediums, and aim to question and redefine photography's various roles and boundaries.

Spencer Murphy was born in 1978 and grew up in the Kentish countryside. Raised in relative isolation, miles from the nearest shop or school, Spencer often found himself with only his imagination for company and the surrounding woodland as his playground. It was a combination of this imagination and an early discovery of his mother’s back issues of Life and National Geographic that sparked an early enthusiasm for photography at the age of 11. As a result, his parents bought him his first camera and photography quickly became a channel for his creativity.

Spencer now lives and works in London, dividing his time between creating his own artwork, taking on photographic commissions and lecturing on photography at University College Falmouth.

He has contributed to many magazines, including The Guardian Weekend, The Sunday Telegraph – Seven Magazine, The New Statesman, Monocle and Wired. His portraits have also appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone Magazine, GQ and Dazed and Confused. He has exhibited throughout Europe and North America and was named as one of the Hyeres Festival’s emerging photographers of 2008. He was also included in the National Portrait Gallery Photographic Portrait Prize (now Taylor Wessing) exhibition in 2006, 2008 and 2009. His work has also been acquired for the NPG's Pemanent Collection

Vanessa Winship was born and currently resides in the United Kingdom. For almost a decade, she lived and worked in the Balkans and Turkey. She received two First Prize World Press Photo Awards in 1998 and 2008, respectively. Since 2005 she has been represented by Agence VU in Paris.

After studying cinema and photography at Westminster University (Polytechnic of Central London), Vanessa shares her time between photography and teaching. She then fully devotes herself to photography and lives for about 10 years in the Balkans and Turkey.

Her work has been exhibited on three separate occasions at the National Portrait Gallery in London, as well as the Kunsthal Museum, Rotterdam.